Marcel's Linux Walkabout: Groupware Revisited

The Linux adventure continues. Corporate groupware suites provide the framework for access to electronic mail, discussion forums, planning and calendaring functions, contact managers, address books, and so on. Join author and columnist Marcel Gagné on his Linux Walkabout as he continues his exploration of open source groupware solutions. In this article, you'll meet Twiggi, a professional, tightly integrated, web-based groupware suite that will save you both time and money. Why deal with the administrative nightmare of loading individual PC clients with expensive software when those PCs already have everything you need?

From the author of

From the author of

Welcome back, everyone, to Marcel's Linux Walkabout, a fearless
exploration of Linux applications and the open source world.
Last time around,
I took you through an exploration of an up and coming groupware suite for your
business, phpGroupWare.

If you went ahead and set up some user accounts, you may have noticed the
sheer number of applications that are available to your users. The most
important of these includes email, the calendar, contact manager, and todo
lists. But what about all those other interesting applications? The list
contains things like chat, stocks, comics, and so on.

Some of these applications aren't available "out of the box"
for various reasons. They may not qualify as core business applications (do you
need the daily comics?) or they may be incomplete or still early in the
development cycle. These incomplete or transitional applications may seem
frightening at first, but consider this. One of the greatest things about these
open source projects is their very transparency. You can actually see where a
project is headed and you are also welcome to participate. Rather than looking
at all this as incomplete, I tend to see it as a promise of what is to
come, a promise in whose fulfillment you can participate.

Before we move on to other things, consider joining the mailing list and
offering your suggestions. The
phpGroupWare mailing lists
are free and you can scan the archives for past messages. If you would rather
work with the bleeding edge of phpGroupWare, I recommend that you pay a visit to
the CVS (Concurrent
Versions System) repository. To quote from the man page: "... CVS is a
version control system, which allows you to keep old versions of files (usually
source code), keep a log of who, when, and why changes occurred, etc."

In the development cycle of a major project such as this one, CVS is where
the real action is taking place. CVS can be an extremely dynamic environment
with programmers making changes daily, or even hourly. Working with CVS
isn't as complex as it sounds if all you want to do is download the
software and go. Here's what you do.

Start by creating a directory where the software will live (phpwg, for
instance). Then checkout the CVS version of the package:

Note that period at the end of the last line above. One of the really neat
things you can do with CVS is checkout (or update) a single module in a package
(such as "forum", for example). The period is equivalent to saying
"get me the works."

If you keep your package up to date using CVS, I have to emphasize the
advantages of joining the mailing list. Remember that this is still beta
software and by using CVS to keep up, you are working with transitional,
possibly unstable code. At various stages in the development cycle, you may be
instructed to use a different development branch.

The stable release and its core applications are quite mature and that
may be sufficient, but if you are excited about a particular feature that is
still in development, the risks of working with CVS code may be worth it.

The Joys of Using IMAP

I think it is safe to say that the most important application in the
groupware suite is electronic mail. Because phpGroupWare uses IMAP for email, I
now have the perfect opportunity to tell you that IMAP iswonderful(and use that as a segue into another groupware suite I'd like you to
consider).

There are a number of advantages to running IMAP. The fact that you can
select a wide variety of email clients that can access your remote mailboxes is
a plus. Using IMAP, it is possible to switch from one IMAP based client to
another without having a negative impact on the mail folders. You can access
your remote mail folders as though they were locally installed on your client
system. That means you can switch from phpGroupWare to Twiggi, (or any other
IMAP client) and still have access to your email. Even better, you can switch
from one operating system to another or one location to another and your mail
folders remain as they were. Taking a holiday to the south of Italy? Just walk
into any Internet cafe and check on your email. Your mail is wherever you are.

That, my friends, is freedom. Here's another plus for the system
administrators out there. Why have mail downloaded to individual client PCs when
you don't have to? Having your mail reside on the server means you
don't have to trust your users to back up their PCs  at least when it
comes to mail.